I only have to look at my own family to see just how much enabling can hurt others. My maternal grandmother was the child of an abusive alcoholic father and an enabling mother. Her assigned family role was to keep the family secrets and pretend that “everything was lovely” no matter how bad it was. […]

Many of us make “resolutions” for the New Year, sort of like “I’m gonna go to the gym regularly and lose 25 pounds.” Unfortunately many (most?) times we don’t keep up the ambition to really complete these “resolutions” and by February we have said “oh, fudge, I give up” and we quit trying […]

Throughout my lifetime, I’ve frequently felt compelled to “help” people, regardless of what type of help they might have needed. Given my dysfunctional and abusive childhood, that compulsion to “fix” or “help” became a personal pathology. I truly believed that I could “help” others reach their true potential, because the responsibility to “fix” […]

I recently had to go to a court hearing, nothing criminal, but procedural, and the anticipation of this hearing drove me into a complete panic attack, similar I think to the way that Joyce experienced the anticipation of her son’s last parole hearing. I experienced catastrophic thinking and the anxiety left me barely able to […]

Many of us can look at other people’s problems and see the solution very clearly, this is called “outsight” but we have trouble seeing the problems in our own families and lives, which is “insight.” One of the things that therapists will tell people in troubled intimate relationships is that we must own our own […]

Each of us has various “roles” we play in life, different positions. If we are female, then we have the role of how a female “should” act (though through the centuries some of these roles change, and in various cultures they differ from one another). If we are a married woman, then we have the […]

Many of us remember Ted Bundy, the charming psychopathic rapist and murderer, who killed dozens, perhaps as many as a hundred women during the 1970s and maybe earlier. He eventually went to the electric chair for several of these murders committed in Florida. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy Bundy worked for a time at a suicide hot line, sitting […]

The following article was brought to our attention by a friend and her comment was “I thought my brain would fall out of my head when I read this story. Is this enabling at its worst?” Read the full article here: http://www.king5.com/news/local/Rape-case-linked-to-WA-state-senators-home-206749651.html By Associated Press and KING 5 News Posted on May 9, 2013 at […]

Next time you feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, you might stop and ask yourself how you got there. It might be that you are being manipulated into taking responsibility that was never yours to begin with. Repeat criminal offenders are invariably manipulators. Not to say that all manipulators wear the scarlet […]

Kids With Conduct Problems May Have Brains That Under-React to Painful Images: May Increase Risk of Adult Psychopathy May 2, 2013 — When children with conduct problems see images of others in pain, key parts of their brains don’t react in the way they do in most people. This pattern of reduced brain activity […]